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Living With Music: A Playlist by Michael Greenberg

By Blake Wilson September 16, 2009 7:00 amSeptember 16, 2009 7:00 am

Michael Greenberg is the author of a new collection of essays, “Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life,” and a memoir, “Hurry Down Sunshine.” He writes the “Freelance” column for the Times Literary Supplement.

Marion EttlingerMichael Greenberg

As a writer, I’ve had to contend with a curse that may be less rare than is generally supposed: I cannot bear to hear a single musical chord, no matter how golden it may be, while trying to lay down a sentence. Music infallibly blocks my flow of language. This is because I can’t help but listen with my entire attention, whether the tune is trashy or sublime. The musicians I knew as a teenager in New York had an aura about them, like athletes, as if an essential aspect of their being was in abeyance between gigs. I wanted to approach writing the same way: chops up, and ready to pour forth when it counted. Maybe this explains why, after a day of writing, I crave music so keenly. I am especially drawn to singers who seem to spill a drop of blood while making sure their lyrics can be heard.

1) You Are So Beautiful, Sarah Vaughan. The divine one, who was not beautiful in any conventional way, pours out the unappreciated sorrow of being a fool for those who are. This cut is from her album “Crazy and Mixed Up.” Her complex voice, that neither Columbia records nor anyone else could tame into a reliable conveyer of commercial pop, travels through territories that most other singers aren’t even aware exist. She reminds me of the novelist Malcolm Lowry, simultaneously sophisticated, elegant and raw.

2) Famous Blue Raincoat, Leonard Cohen. There is no end to the mystery of this song, with its bending rhymes and different storylines that seem to emerge every time you listen to it. “The last time I saw you, you looked so much older / Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder.” Beautifully crafted, but not overexplained. It reminds you to make sure the reader has a stake in what you write; the bigger the stake, the better.

3) Hurt. Johnny Cash takes Trent Reznor’s lament to an unimaginable region of the psyche and the flesh. Cash recorded it just weeks before he died. “What have I become, my sweetest friend?” It’s a testament to the intensity of human feeling right up to the last breath.

4) Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered. Ella Fitzgerald turns this risqué Rodgers and Hart torch song into a novel of self-destructive love that might have been written by Edna O’Brien or Jean Rhys. You know exactly how much she’s willing to give up for the weekend of transcendence that her “half-pint imitation” of a man can bring. Almost everything.

5) It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, Bob Dylan. “Yonder stands your orphan with his gun / crying like a fire in the sun.” Visceral, visual — an image around which you could construct an epic.

6) Don’t Worry ’Bout Me. When Tony Bennett croons this little masterpiece of camouflaged self-pity, you can hear the tuxedo in his voice, though you know it’s rented and will have to be returned in the morning.

7) A Change Is Gonna Come, Sam Cooke. A lot of artists have covered this song in sublime fashion: Otis Redding, Billy Preston, Al Green and Patti Labelle, singing like she’s running in slow motion. But Sam Cooke’s original recording has the dignity and understatement to make it the full cri de coeur that it is.

8) L’Enfance, Jacques Brel. A rough translation of this short, aching ballad: “Childhood. / It’s nothing much with recklessness added. / It’s all that hasn’t been written down. / The grownups are deserters / the middle class an enemy tribe.”

9) Judique on the Floor, Buddy MacMaster. The greatest living Cape Breton fiddler, he plays with the naturalness of a born singer. You feel as if the instrument is a proxy for his entire being. This is traditional dance hall music, playful, casual and from a deep common well — the kind of effortless mastery you reach for when writing, but rarely obtain.

10) Block Ice & Propane, Erik Friedlander. Cello solos about traveling around the country with his parents as a boy. These compositions come at you with improvisational energy at one moment and liturgical dignity at the next. Some are like short stories, others like poems, with names like “Airstream Envy,” “Rusting in Honeysuckle” and “Cold Chicken.”